Art major Aliza Shvarts '08 wants to make a statement.
Beginning next Tuesday, Shvarts will be displaying her senior art project, a documentation of a nine-month process during which she artificially inseminated herself "as often as possible" while periodically taking abortifacient drugs to induce miscarriages. Her exhibition will feature video recordings of these forced miscarriages as well as preserved collections of the blood from the process.
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Very similar stuff done by a Junior, Jena Goldberg, here at Massart, where she put semen in one series of 30 petri dishes, unfertilized eggs in another series, and then a fertilized egg in another series. Yes, the fertilized series grew and then got all brown. High art I guess.
I never spoke to her again.
This whole bullshit reminds me of the time I was at this film festival where the keynote speaker was this deranged Canadian artist who had made a film whose title escapes me. The title (in French) was whatever the slang expression Canadian mothers use to explain menarche to their daughters. Something innocent like "the budding of flowers in the spring." Anyway, this nutcase artist had collected a couple months of her menstual blood, shot a couple minutes of nature (flowers, trees, etc.), submerged said film in her blood, let it soak in, then redubbed the soundtrack with the screams of howler monkeys. Great times. Gave me a headache.
The one exception that springs to mind is a painting by Kiki Smith that I saw once: It was a large canvas, subdivided 3x3 into smaller squares, in each of which was an irregular-shaped blotch. After looking at it for a second, you realized that one blotch was shaped like a liver, one like a stomach, one like an intestine, one like a heart, two like lungs, one like a brain, and two like kidneys.
It was entitled "Nine Tenths of the Law."
It took me a couple more minutes of pondering before I understood: no uterus.
It was sort of clever.
"So I repeatedly artificially inseminiated myself and induced miscarriages over a 9-month period... Just kidding! Ha ha!"
Um, sounds like someone thinks she's the next Tracey Emin. And... isn't.
My memory was playing me slightly false, it seems, in that there don't appear to be any intestines. And a few of the organs are harder for me to recognize than I remembered. What's that one on the center right, for instance?